After 59 years as a Republican, former Congressman Pete McCloskey, who last year challenged then-Rep. Richard Pombo in the congressional primary and then supported the winning campaign of Pombo’s opponent, Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, has registered to vote as a Democrat.

In a letter to his hometown newspaper, the Woodside Almanac, McCloskey criticized the ethics, unbalanced budgets, blurred separation of church and state, and environmental policies of the Republican Party’s leaders.

McCloskey said that Earth Day, which he co-founded while a member of the House, “has become the focus of almost hatred by today’s Republican leadership.”

“Many still argue that global warming is a hoax and that Bush has been right to demean and suppress the arguments of scientists at the (Environmental Protection Agency), Fish

&

Wildlife and U.S. Geological Survey,” McCloskey wrote. “I say a pox on them and their values.”

McCloskey said that Newt Gingrich in 1994 “brought a new kind of Republicanism to power,” and that “the election of George W. Bush in 2000 has led to a wholly new concept of governance.”

McCloskey said, “I finally concluded that it was a fraud for me to remain a member of this modern Republican Party.”